The Arts/Cultural Desk

Robert Stone's latest novel, ''Bay of Souls,'' reads not only like a bad pastiche of Graham Greene, Joseph Conrad, Joan Didion and V. S. Naipaul, served up in portentous, self-important prose, but also like a bad pastiche of Mr. Stone's own earlier fiction -- a hodgepodge of characters, situations and themes cut and pasted together from his previous novels.

April 1, 2003artsReview

The Arts/Cultural Desk

A zealot-tangled Jerusalem just a bomb blast away from Armageddon may be a hard act to follow. But now that his acclaimed literary thriller ''Damascus Gate'' is ensconced on the best-seller lists, Robert Stone is mulling over his next book. It might be something about Alaska. It might be a comic novel. It might conceivably tackle New York City.

May 26, 1998artsBiography

The Arts/Cultural Desk

Lost, disaffected, often desperate, Robert Stone's characters tend to gravitate toward hot, volatile corners of the world -- Vietnam, Central America, the Middle East -- where they find themselves falling victim to bad faith, bad karma and bad vibes. They are people looking for love, money or drugs, the big score or the great escape. But they are also people in search of something larger: some intimation of hope or faith, some hint that there is more to life than the bump and grind of daily existence.

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April 6, 2003, Sunday

BAY OF SOULS By Robert Stone 249 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $25. Robert Stone's latest novel, ''Bay of Souls,'' recounts the story of a middle-aged Midwestern professor's love affair with a mysterious Caribbean beauty and his involvement in her...

April 1, 2003, Tuesday

In Plato's ''Symposium,'' Aristophanes imagines the search for love as one half of a self looking for its other half. Imagine now that in some other Platonic universe, each person has a perfect psychoanalyst waiting out there, one who listens and...